Heyall. So it has been almost three months since I last posted here? Ouch… Here’s what’s new.
Though I started the game just about a year ago, “Space Fight” development is on a bit of a break. It’s an ambitious project and for a guy like me who has never made a big ambitious project, it’s a lot of work. And since a lot of work takes a lot of time, my wife suggested maybe I should get something smaller out quicker (insert that’s what she said joke here). So in the meantime I’m learning how to develop for the Android platform with the book Beginning Android Games. My wife and I brainstormed what we think may be a fun little game for touch screens so I’ll be making a small game for Android before moving on to the bigger more ambitious projects.
Kev Glass has started to flip my world upside down now with his HTML5 version of Legends of Yore! He has written the game in Java and compiled it into Javascript using GWT and the canvas widget. How cool is that? It’s significant for me as I was going to look into HTML5 game development but it appears that now you can just code your game using Java2D and have it compiled into Javascript and runnable on all manner of platforms (iPhone, Android, WebOS, PC, etc) right away.
I suppose the best course of action may be to finish Space Fight in it’s current framework and worry about porting it over to Java2D later. But first I learn Android development!
This screenshot is going to look familiar.
It will look very similar to this image.
So what’s the difference? Well, the previous image shows off a very inefficient 55878 polygons with 579 nodes. The image above proudly displays a much more efficient 3417 polygons with only 16 nodes.
You may notice the right hand side, there’s an inconsistency with one of the sub-maps (a recursed AccessibleAreaMap) that appears to have stopped rotating when there was still room to continue mapping. Likewise in the top-right area. So there is still room for further improvements.
At the very least, I’m happy that the AccessibleAreaMap generation happens almost instantaneously where previously it took at least a few seconds. Rendering the AccessibleAreaMap also no longer strains the loop.
I had fun with this one, too. Shadows!
I had the theory churning in my head and this tigsource thread helped me solidify it in my brainspace.
It’s not something I absolutely needed in SpaceFight! but it’s kind of a staple for 2-dimensional games. Mostly, I was trying to wrap my head around an alternate method of accessible area mapping. When working with “lighting” it’s important to forget about the light. What’s important are the shadows. Now I can try working these ‘light sources’ into the accessible area map, placing one at each available node, and I could have that efficient accessible area mapping algorithm I’ve been looking for.
I could have sworn I’d already posted this graphic.
Still, this is the “accessible area map” implemented in SpaceFight!. If you visit the prototype page you should be able to give it a try. It needs some improvement. It’s a resource hog, especially where there are a lot of wall tiles side by side. And the polygons haven’t joined together as I’d hoped, as you can see by the multitude of ‘pie slices’.
After I’ve reduced the inefficiencies of the algorithm and made the accessible area mapping look good, I get to work on the path-finding. Something to map points of the shortest distance between the player’s location and where the player wants to go within the accessible area. And to display that path. I’m sure it will be all kinds of fun. Seriously. It was all kinds of fun getting the accessible area map to the point it’s at now.
The prototype has always been available here but this is a reminder in case you were unaware. However, that link won’t be the permanent location of SpaceFight!. It will eventually have its own proper home. Probably on another domain I recently purchased and set up. Mystery! Kind of.
